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It's All About Sex
By Douglas Groothuis
https://douglasgroothuis.com/
February 3, 2021
The leading secular account of the world in the West denies any normative or sacred order. Freedom is found, not in following a divine design, but in indulging the unfettered self. Self-restraint, especially erotic self-restraint, is repressive and must be eliminated. Pleasure of the strongest kind is what matters most, since we need not fear God or conform ourselves to some alien pattern of behavior written in a heaven of ideas.
Thus, any viewpoint that opposes the totally free expression of sexuality must be silenced--not refuted, silenced. On this view, free speech is not a right; in fact, it can be ruse for the repressive ones (Christians or those believe in any sacred ordering of life). Any view that denies the erotic urgencies has no right to be heard. Herbert Marcuse advocated this in 1965 in his essay on "repressive tolerance."
Thus, it all comes down to sex. Anyone who opposes abortion in any way wants to hinder women's sexual freedom, since abortion allows for sex without the moral responsibility to bring a child to term. The expressive self is all that matters. Killing a viable fetus at nine months is fine, since women's sexual freedom must be upheld at all costs.
Further, it is not enough to be tolerant of people who act in non-heterosexual ways. Legalizing same sex marriage is not enough either. Rather, everyone must endorse every sexual identity, because that is the more important thing about people--their erotic orientation and the pleasure therein. If a Christian baker will not decorate a cake for a gay wedding, he must be punished by force of law, since he is refuting to endorse two gay men's sexual identity. How dare he?
The untrammeled will, fired by uninhibited eroticism, has the final say and shouts with a loud voice. You are not allowed to disagree with this power from below, this meaning-making faculty. Eros must be let loose in a world without design or constraint.
Along the way, Rousseau, Blake, Wadsworth, Shelley, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Nietzsche, Marcuse, Reich, Simone De Beauvoir, and others play their part to make a world safe for pansexuality.
For more on these themes, see Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020).
Douglas Groothuis, PH.D. is a Christian Philosopher and Apologist. He is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society, Evangelical Philosophical Society, and Society of Christian Philosophers. Author of numerous books including Christian Apologetics. Douglas Groothuis is the Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary.
